Millions of people right now are experiencing a yearning and desire to awaken to their unique gifts and offer them in service to the world—while living a life of joy and fulfillment. It’s a surging of the human spirit, a virtual global awakening, at a scale no one has ever seen before. Simply put, people are longing to feel fully alive and to fulfill their unique purpose in life.
So then why is living a life of meaning and purpose so difficult? It is because our social systems have not been set up to prepare us to live a life this way. Today’s culture exists not to nurture our highest aspirations but to ensure our basic survival.
Our educational system is designed to create good workers who will slot into jobs and careers later in life, not to empower fiery, creative people who are forging the path ahead together.
Our social contracts exist to perpetuate the status quo, not to encourage our highest potential to blossom. Is it any wonder why so many people’s best attempts to evolve themselves and our culture fall short of the goal? They simply haven’t been trained in how to bring the possible future into the present.
It’s not that they don’t have the talent or interest to live a purposeful, meaningful life; the issue is far simpler. People struggle to activate their "purpose code" because they haven’t woken up to—or are only partially awake to—our situation as a human race. Most people hold on to old, limiting beliefs of themselves and our human story. Overwhelmed by all the changes in the world around them, most people live their lives within a "small story," confining themselves to "small selves." That’s why so many people feel they don’t have a purpose or that they aren’t able to live the life they were born to live.
There is a saying that “what the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.” It is butterfly time. Just as the guidance cells in the mush that is the caterpillar in its cocoon suddenly begin to activate the transformation of mush into butterfly, this is the time when we realize that the guidance cells of our bodies, our communities, and, yes, even the cells of our planet are calling us to come together in all our parts to form something gorgeous, interdependent, living lightly on the Earth, cross-pollinating cultures, ideas, spiritual forms, glowing with the light that suffuses us, becoming transparent to transcendence. And to rise out of the mush we have been caught in for hundreds of years and take flight in the air of the new story that is emerging in our time. 
For the fields we traverse, the many flowers of mind states and soul knowings we now enter are those that belong to the whole Earth, to many cultures, to what I am calling PanGaia. And as the butterfly pollinates and cross-pollinates from place to place, flower to flower, so do we if we have the will and the willingness to discover our purpose and be part of this extraordinary moment in time.
The Three Keys to Empowering New Beliefs 
The First Key to activating your life’s purpose is to hold new beliefs about yourself and about your role in the Great Story of where humanity is headed.
Living a great life requires that you understand the challenges and opportunities of our moment in history. To understand this for myself, I’ve gathered information from my work in over 100 countries and 40 different cultures, and what I’ve discovered has served as a sure guide on my path. Specifically, I have found five great shifts in our understanding of the story of our time that are affecting everything we do today.  I believe that awakening to the power of these shifts will help you cultivate your sense of compassion and of the infinite possibilities of this moment.
The five shifts are:

1. Our understanding of who and what we are and what we need to become in order to be able to deal with the complexity of our time is evolving
2. Human societies are in the process of re-patterning. Social constructs are dissolving and whole new stories are trying to emerge, such as the rise of women to a full partnership with men across the globe
3. How we conduct business and governance is shifting in the midst of vast ecological and financial changes.  This is perhaps the most important social event of the last 5,000 years because these issues impact almost everything in our lives
4. The rise and fusion of different cultures—we are swiftly moving toward a planetary civilization that accentuates the uniqueness of each culture while also blending them together, not unlike the great fusions of food and of music and of beliefs we already see in the world
5. Whole new orders of spirituality are emerging that are not about religion. The new cosmologies are giving us a view of ourselves that we’ve never had before. For the first time ever, we find that we don’t just live in the universe, but that the universe lives in us

This journey begins by letting go of old beliefs and patterns to make room for the new beliefs and capacities that will empower you to awaken to and live your higher purpose.
The Second Key allows you to discover and realize the vast field of inner intelligence by using multiple means of knowing and being to gain insight into life at a level at which most people rarely have access. These skills are to be found on four levels of your human capacity: sensory-physical, psychological-emotional, mythic-symbolic and unitive-spiritual. As you learn how to use the extraordinary capacities found at each of these levels, you literally move into new ways of being. For example, you will learn how to play with time in such a way as to take five minutes and experience it internally as hours. These are "hours" you can use to develop a skill or move a project forward.
You will learn to access "inner experts," willing helpers or personas that will help you navigate the complexity of life with elegance and confidence.
The Third Key gives you the means to break free from unconscious, habitual ways of reacting to life born thousands of years ago and embrace higher ways of being for a new era. You will discover ways to move through life with ebullience in your bones and an appetite for celebration, seeing everything as an expression of the creator. You will move through life, motivated not by guilt or obligation but by gratitude and an abiding zest for doing the things that are called forth by living from your higher purpose.
Guest blog by Jean Houston, a visionary thinker, teacher, and philosopher who pioneered the Human Potential Movement and established the Social Artistry leadership model that she used in her work with the United Nations Development Program. She is on the faculty of Evolving Wisdom, an e-learning company specializing in transformative education.
On Thursday, April 11 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, Houston will start with a seven-week course online titled Awakening to Your Life Purpose, which will guide you through the process of bringing more meaning and purpose into your life. Find out more here.